“Oh, that’s great, Cal,” Eva said sarcastically. “Hector’s already sold their tickets. We can’t hope to ever get them back.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but all we can do is make sure that Hector can’t cheat anyone else of their destiny.”
“We don’t think Hector did sell the tickets,” I countered.
“Sweetie,” Eva said patiently, “everybody from here to Zapato knows that Hector LeMans will sell a Double-N ticket to anyone who can pay what he’s asking. How long do you suppose he’d be in business if he didn’t hand over the merchandise after receiving payment, huh?”
“But have you ever seen any of those tickets yourself?” Meche asked.
“Well, no,” Eva admitted, “but what does that matter?”
“If you had ever seen one,” I told her, “you’d know. We found suitcases full of Double-N tickets on that factory island. All counterfeit.”
For once, Eva didn’t have a ready comeback. “Well,” she said thoughtfully after a few seconds, “we wondered how Hector could keep up with the demand. We suspected counterfeiting might be involved, but we couldn’t be sure.”
“Couldn’t you have tried buying a ticket yourselves?” Meche asked.
“Well, of course we did, sweetie,” Eva answered shortly. “More than once. The main idea was to get close to Hector and sprout him, but the agents tasked for that never succeeded, nor even came back.”
“Maybe they took the tickets and—” I began.
“One of them was your friend Alexi,” Eva snapped.
“Oh.” And I’d recruited the man. Yet another sprouted soul on my conscience.
“And the rest were just as committed. Somehow, Hector must have found them out.” Eva shook her head and growled softly. “I admit, what you say complicates things a little, but… I’m sorry, Cal. We have to go ahead with this as planned, if we can. Now, you’ll have to give me space so I can round up the agents Salvador needs.”
I gave Eva her space as she worked the radio. She seemed to need it, apparently having a lot of trouble raising agents. While Eva was barking call signs and orders into the microphone, Meche gestured for me to come over to her.
“Look at this,” she said, showing a piece of paper to me. It was a memo from Salvador. ‘In light of the recent disappearances,’ it read, ‘all agents are ordered to avoid traveling alone until further notice.’ “If they’re all that cautious, why would Salvador take on Olivia so quickly?” Meche asked.
“I get the feeling you don’t like her much,” I said.
“I’m not so sure she’s reliable.”
“Well, she took care of that mercury switch,” I said, “and she protected my ‘secret identity,’ even though she didn’t need to do either of those things. You’re right that Sal’s a careful guy. He usually screens potential recruits pretty thoroughly, but he seems to just take my word for it.” I shrugged. “You gotta admit, Paddy in Puerto Zapato and the former Rubacava cell all worked out just fine.” I looked over at Eva, still working the radio. “Eva’s not having much luck. I guess they’ve lost a lot of agents recently.”
“Hector!” Meche said the name like a curse, savagely crumpling the memo into a tight ball. “What’s wrong with people? How can they put up with what he’s doing? How can he get away with robbing good people, and sprouting others left and right?”
“You saw the city,” I pointed out. “Hector’s throwing a good time.”
“So what you’re saying,” Meche observed acidly, “is that people are being distracted by a shiny object?” She shook her head. “Well, I don’t buy it, Manny. What makes Eva different from that man who turned his car around? Supposedly she’s the worst of the two. Or what’s separates you from Domino? You were both bad enough to be made reapers.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Me neither,” she said with a sigh. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe glamour and glitz are all it takes to make people look the other way.”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. It wasn’t worth arguing about, especially since I was afraid I couldn’t be proven wrong.
The Enlightened Florist
After a while I found myself looking over the LSA’s surveillance equipment. Apparently they had bugs all over the city. And there was that fallen agent with some kind of camera. The picture was still on the monitor. The image was the right way up now, and apparently on a table or a workbench of some kind. It was hard to tell, since there were leaves obscuring parts of the image, but right in front of the camera seemed to be that same little man who had cowered before Hector. He was fiddling with the foliage that grew from the now-dismembered soul. He seemed to be… pruning? I’d seen too many sproutings to be sickened by them any more but this guy was way beyond sick.
“So who’s the plant nut?” I asked myself, but out loud.
“That ‘nut’,” Eva said, putting down the radio’s mic and coming over to me, “is Hector LeMans’ personal munitions expert, Bowlsley—AKA, the Florist. That was his job in the old world, but here he’s a botanical weapons expert. This has left him fairly… conflicted.”
Meche had come over and looked at the screen, too. “I’d call that ‘disturbed’,” she said.
“He looks like a hippie,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect a guy like that to be involved in weapons at all. But, since he is, why is he making sproutella for Hector and not for our side?”
“We would love to recruit him,” Eva said. “He’s developed a special kind of sproutella just for Hector. It’s almost instantaneous. But his lab is in Hector’s tower. He’s untouchable.”
“Maybe I could get him out,” I said.
“Darling,” Eva said, “how do you expect to do that? No offense—you’ve accomplished some amazing things over the years—but you have no real field experience. Anyway,” she said with a sniff, “it’s been tried.”
“Maybe I’m no James Bond,” I said, “but I do have this.” I pulled the note the Gatekeeper gave me out of my pocket. “Bowlsley looks to me like a nervous guy. If we can get this to him, he might bolt and then be picked up.”
Eva took the note and read it. “This is Hector’s handwriting!” she exclaimed. “Where’d you ever get this?”
“It was waiting for me at the end of the line.” Eva shook her head in amazement. “No doubt about it,” I said, “Hector’s on the ball.”
“You’re telling me,” Eva said. “There’s no salutation on this thing, so maybe Bowlsley will think it was meant for him. We hear that he’s been getting progressively more unstable. He might just take off if he sees this. Question is, how do we get it to him?”
“Carrier pigeon?” Meche suggested.
Eva shook her head. “These birds are trained to deliver messages only to our agents.”
“Well,” I said, “you’ve got an agent with Bowlsley right now, you know.”
Eva looked at me, impressed. “Now that’s thinking, sweetheart. This note’s kind of large, but it’s worth a try.”
Eva picked a bird and managed to get Hector’s threat into the tube. Then she took the pigeon and carried it out. A few minutes later she came back.
“Well,” she said, “Lola’s airborne.” I winced and Meche jumped slightly. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“What about Salvador?” I asked after a while. “Did you get enough agents for him?”
“It seemed like you couldn’t get in touch with a lot,” Meche said. “Is Hector’s gang hurting you that much?”